


Seventeen Days

by OnceUponASomeday



Category: Nashville (TV)
Genre: F/M, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-16 02:25:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceUponASomeday/pseuds/OnceUponASomeday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hospital walls and all that's in-between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: They're not mine - if they were, I would have kicked Deacon out of that car and made him get the bus.**

His chair, the nurses call it.

They don't move it from the corner where he put it the night he was well enough - not really enough - to get up from his hospital bed and find her room. The doctors had tried to stop him, of course, something about broken ribs not healing so well when you're dragging the drip in your arm up and down sterile corridors, but he doesn't give a shit about his ribs even if he does feel them crack every time he breathes in. Rayna would have told him off if she'd been awake, told him he was being a stubborn idiot and he should listen to the people in the white coats. But she isn't awake, she hasn't been awake for two and a half weeks - seventeen days, he counts the hours of each one - and he would give anything to have her scold him, tell him he needs to go back to bed and stop giving the nurses more work to do. He stays with her at night times, when there is no one else in her room but doctors who write things on the chart at the end of her bed and the nurses who look pityingly at him and leave without a word. He stays to keep her company when it's dark outside and she's alone, and he stays because he cannot do anything but. His Chair, the man with sunken eyes in an ashen face who sits and looks at her like he is nothing more than the sum of his parts, and every one of those parts hurts like hell because she lies there and doesn't move. They all know who he is, they know who she is to him, and they don't ask questions. There's a cushion on His Chair when he goes to sit in it on the fifth night she doesn't wake up.

#

He doesn't hold her hand. He can't; a spider's thread is all that's holding him together and it would snap the moment he touched her and felt her cold skin. In life her hands are always busy - gripping a microphone, slicing ham and cheese sandwiches for her children, tracing the line of stubble on his chin. Her hands are gentle, delicate, warm, they can soothe a cut knee and rub an upset stomach better - his, often, in days gone by - but they can just as well change a tyre and wipe the oil on his jeans suggestively. Her hands have always been on his list of favourite things about her, but in this bed in this hospital that smells of cleaning fluid and fear they are empty and still. They lay at her side with nothing to do, nothing to keep them busy. So he doesn't hold her hand.

#

She's hooked up to machines, lots of machines, and the wires remind him of veins, reds and blues and strange clear tubes that pump things into her. He doesn't know what any of the machines do, only that they keep her alive, and for that he is grateful. Some of them beep, sometimes too quickly and he feels red hot fear shoot through him, but they slow and he calms. The hole in his side that is held together with stitches burns when that happens, and he's glad it does; he's sorry, so sorry. There are so many machines.

#

The nurses like him. They shouldn't let him sleep in her room, not really, he's not her next of kin - not on paper - and he's a patient too, so if they were playing by the rules they should send him packing to his uncomfortable bed under the clock on the wall that ticks too loudly. But rules don't count when your love is breathing through a tube and the bruises on her face are so bad they're almost black and when you are a broken man who might just stop breathing yourself if they make you move more than a few metres from her. And besides, the nurses like him. He heard them say so when he was pretending to be asleep one night, heard them call it romantic, his vigil. _For a man to love you like that_ they said, _doesn't it get you right there?_ The nurses have a soft spot for the man that nearly killed his love.

#

These walls have become familiar. There is a card on the side from her daughters, Daphne's carefully measured letters spelling out her name finished with a wonky love heart, Maddie's shaky scrawl professing her hope that their mother will be home with them soon. Flowers sit on every surface, sent by people she knows and people she doesn't, family, friends, fans. He wonders how many will die before she wakes. In the corner there is a bag of her things. He looked through it when he could no longer help himself, the urge to hold something that was her overwhelmingly strong. There had been clothes, a hopeful gesture that she would need them, a photograph of her with the girls, her favourite necklace. And there had been a paperback book with a piece of paper sticking out where she'd been up to. When he'd pulled it out to look at it, he'd seen that she'd been marking her page with a ticket stub from one of their shows, a small concert hall they'd played twenty years ago. His hands had shook as he'd zipped the bag back up.

#

He spends his nights breathing in time with her. Her chest rises and falls and he watches it; it is the only constant he has to grasp on to. He started doing it the first night he stayed in her room, realised by accident that he was mimicking her, her intakes of air an assurance of life, even if they are prompted mechanically. In and out, in and out, steady. It is of little comfort, but comfort all the same. He breathes with her to encourage her to join him, wills her to do it too.

#

The hospital gowns are itchy. He hates them. He'd tried to swap his for a flannel he'd gotten Scarlett to smuggle in but a nurse, the nice one with the really round hips, took it from him and locked it in a cupboard, and he hasn't been able to find the key. Not even in all the hours he's had with nothing to do during the days when Rayna has visitors who fill her room but never sit in His Chair and he can't bring himself to go near them because if he did he'd have to look them in the eye, the people she loves who nearly lost her. He has a daughter, he knows now, she comes to see her mother, brushes her hair and sings her lullabies. He listens outside the door, would try his best to give her some semblance of comfort if he didn't think she would puncture his other lung, if he didn't think she would punish him with all she has for what he has done. He knows that she knows, they all do, he's seen the newspapers on the reception as he passes, the ones the woman sat behind the desk tries to hide. And then comes the day he hears Maddie sing one of their songs to her, her sweet voice quiet and sad, the words almost lost, but he would know the melody anywhere. It is brandished in his memory, and when he hears it the grief wraps around him so tightly everything spins and a nurse finds him there, slumped against the wall. He isn't allowed to stay with Rayna that night.

#

It's been a week when he wakes to find a blanket tucked up to his chin. It's one of those cheap things, threadbare and washed in harsh detergent, used by countless people who have sat and fought off the chill of the ward while they wait and say prayers and try not to lose themselves in the desolation of it all.

'Mornin' Bertha,' he says, and his voice is scratchy from lack of use. He hasn't done much talking while he's been in here. He's done a lot of thinking, but not much talking. He wouldn't know what to say.

'It's the middle of the night sugar,' Bertha gently tells him, her standard issue shoes squeaking quietly on the floor tiles, 'and you're doing yourself no favours being wide awake.' She hands him a polystyrene cup full of the nasty vending machine coffee that Rayna secretly likes, and offers him a smile. It's small, but it's a smile, and there haven't been many of those coming his way lately. The coffee tastes better than anything he's put in his mouth since the whiskey that landed them there.

#

From the window in his room he can see the car park, comings and goings regular in the day, sirens and flurries of doctors racing to bring in a new casualty. He thinks about what it was like the night they brought him and Rayna in. Whether anyone was in this room then, stood by the window, watching. Wondering if they'd make it.

#

She doesn't wear one of the gowns. She did, but one night he opens the door and is stopped in his tracks by the image of her in the bed. The tubes have been removed from her throat, she breathes on her own, and she is in a nightgown he knows, one he's seen her in when they've been on tour and he's found her on the roof of their hotel staring out into nothing when her attempts at sleep have failed. It is dark blue and made of silk, and he allows himself the smallest touch, a little patch that lays across her shoulder. Her hair has been washed and brushed and it is fanned out on a pillow borrowed from her own bed. She looks like Rayna. He is still crying when Bertha comes in and makes him sit in His Chair and drink a glass of tap water.

#

He finds a card on his nightstand when they have been in the hospital for two weeks. It is white with a simple picture of a daisy, and it contains only one line. _Get well soon Deacon_ , it reads, _love Maddie_. He puts it next to the one from his sister and looks at it so many times the words no longer make sense.

#

Coleman comes to see him every day. He comes to make sure he's not tipping the contents of a hipflask into the bitter orange juice they give him for breakfast, and he comes to make sure he's not hovering on a window ledge with his arse hanging out of his hospital gown. He brings him magazines to give him something to look at other than the hastily painted ceiling and Rayna's frozen face, and for a while he took to reading them, but he stopped the day he opened one at a paparazzi picture of the upturned wreck he used to drive to pick up groceries. Coleman also comes to tell him everything will be ok, she'll be ok, they'll be ok. He doesn't know if he believes him, but a part of him that is a little boy who is oh so lost clings on for dear life to hope. It is all he has.

#

On the seventeenth day he hears the machines beep from down the hall and he knows it's her room the panicked footsteps run towards.


	2. Chapter 2

She sips water through a straw. The doctors won't let her have anything else, they tell her she isn't ready, isn't strong enough to walk, isn't healed enough to sit up, isn't going to get out of here anytime soon. They feed her through a drip that would leave a bruise on her arm if only she wasn't already so covered in bruises she looks like a map of China. She can't see the colour of her own skin anymore.

#

There is a morning she wakes with the surety that she can smell him. He has been here. The very feel of him lingers in the anonymous air of the room, and there is an imprint in the cushion that sits in the chair furthest away from her. She tells herself she's imagining it - he was discharged a week ago - but she knows. He was here.

#

Her fingernails have been painted. When she can lift her hands high enough to look at them she inspects the shiny pink polish. She never wears pink, and it gives away the culprits. Daphne picked out the colour and Maddie did the painting, they tell her, and Daphne falls quiet when she asks in mock horror how chipped the polish was that she'd had on before. The blood beneath her nails had shocked them when they'd taken the old stuff off, and they'd scrubbed it away with a brush and warm water, her two daughters who were too young to lose their mother. She had been, too.

#

The last night they spent together was a happy one. Stupidly happy, actually. It had been three nights before the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan and the car hit the embankment and their blood mingled and stained the grass until it rained the next day. They'd come home - Deacon's home that felt more like her home than the place that had her name next to Teddy's on the deeds - from the Grand Ole Opry where Scarlett had given Rayna butterflies as she'd watched from the side of the stage. They'd settled on his couch with mismatched mugs of cocoa, hers with the little sprinkle of cinnamon he'd always added for her, and she'd rested her legs across his lap and watched him with her head on the worn leather. He'd looked at her like he had craved her for all of time, and in place of the barely contained pain he had worn for years was a slightly dazed look, a man so in love he couldn't quite believe she was there smiling at him and wearing his jumper to keep out the chill. He'd burnt his lip on his cocoa and she'd laughed softly as she'd kissed him, and when they'd fallen into his bed later he'd still tasted of chocolate, and she hadn't laughed when she'd kissed him then. It hurts when she cries, so she doesn't do it.

#

Maddie knows. It hits her one morning when the nurses have done their rounds and they've closed the door behind them and left her a fresh water glass. Maddie knows Deacon is her father. She wonders if there might be an odd sense of relief in the place she is so used to feeling guilt, but there is none to be found. The guilt is so strong it almost chokes her, and for the first time she enjoys the pain shooting through her abdomen where half the windscreen definitely shouldn't have been. The pain is punishment for thirteen years of lies. She tries to use it to distract herself from how much everything else hurts. Her shattered ribcage and the grotesque protrusion of her arm will heal far sooner than everything else. She is glad it's her lying in the hard bed and not him. She hopes he is home drinking tea in his kitchen.

#

Bucky brings her DVDs. Terrible ones, Caddyshack levels of terrible, and she loves him for it. He comes to see her with Tandy and Rayna sees how close they have grown, is glad that something good has sprung from something so otherwise shitty. He squeezes her sister's shoulder as he tells them he is going to make a phone call, and Rayna watches her face as she nods up at him with a beam she tries to keep in check. 'What?' is all Tandy says, but Rayna grills her for details. It cheers her up even more than Chevy Chase.

#

Liam sends flowers. Of course he does, a cancelled weekend of sex and suncream is no match for learning you have a child who cried through the night as a baby for a father she didn't know was hers. The note with the flowers - lilies, she loves lilies - tells her he is in Germany, that he came to see her when she was still out cold. He jokes about them needing to finish their record, could she hurry up and get back on her feet please, what a dramatic way to score some time off work, and she sleeps with the little card under her pillow, wondering how different it would have been if she hadn't felt the desperate urge to tell Deacon she loved him. It had been as much for his benefit as for hers, her need to share what she knew was such longed-for information what had fuelled her to drive over there that night and change her mind six times about knocking on his door before she'd just thought _screw it_ and done it anyway. The way he couldn't look at her in that hallway backstage had been like ice in her belly, how _tired_ he was of it, the struggle she'd known just as long as he had. But she was a mother, was for a long time a wife, was a star, had pockets she could hide in, Other Things. Deacon had no other things. He had only his love for her and a pen he used to write about his love for her and a guitar he played the songs on that he wrote about his love for her, and his torment had nowhere else to go. She saw it in his face when he stared at anything but her, and she knew it was time, that she needed to save him from not knowing she felt it just like he did. So she told him she loved him. The lilies wither in three days.

#

Daphne reads her stories. It's creative writing semester at school, and she wants to share her efforts with her mother, her little voice proud as she reads from her exercise book with the music note doodles on the front in HB pencil. When she thinks Rayna is asleep, her eyes coaxed shut by tales of Alfie the class hamster, she lays her head down on the bed and cries softly. But Rayna isn't asleep, and her daughter's tears remind her just what a close call she's had. She strokes her hair and murmurs nonsensical words until Daphne is the one who falls asleep.

#

He wants them to be a family again, Teddy tells her. He misses her, he wants her to come home, to a real home, their family home. He wants to stop the divorce proceedings. She doesn't know what she wants. He was a pillar for her back when her life was in pitiable tatters, and he has been a pillar for her this time too. He brings the girls to see her every day. He sneaks in the little chocolate truffles that she loves and isn't supposed to eat but Teddy is surprising in the rules he breaks for her. He changes her pyjamas when she is well enough to wear her own, rubs her arm while he sits and tells her unimportant bits of information about the outside world just so she doesn't forget it exists. She feels vulnerable, like all of her armour has been stripped away, and she supposes it has, really. She lies there at the mercy of other people, unable to be who she used to spend her days being, and there is no Deacon to anchor her, no Deacon to act as a mirror for her to look into and see herself as she is - as she has always been with her armour stripped away. It is a comfort, the thought of being a family, of being safe and cocooned from the nightmare she survived once and just about made it through this time. She doesn't know if she will survive it again. She doesn't know what she wants.

#

He holds her hand. It is her father that sits in the visitor's chair this time, not her. She lays in the bed with her eyes closed, too exhausted to say anything, and he holds her hand. It has been years since he's held her hand. She would almost be able to remember the exact occasion if she thought about it hard enough, probably when she was a child, still in pigtails and knee socks, racing through a playground and emerging from a sandpit with a split lip. Her father's hands are dry and unused to giving love, but they try, and she squeezes them back.

#

Like trying to catch a butterfly, Watty had said. He was talking about her mother but as she watches the spider that spins itself in circles at the corner of the open window she can hear Deacon repeat the same words to Maddie one day when she is trying to understand how the people that conceived her fucked everything up so badly. For only two people they have made a hell of a mess. She watches the spider reverse pointlessly and bump into the glass and is angry at it for not seeing how stupid it is being.

#

It isn't furniture this time, it's bones. She's broken fifty-two of them, Dr Hill says. He has a wife and three children and a condo in Florida that he plans to retire to next year when his pension plan starts paying out. His wife has all of her albums, he tells her with a conspiratorial wink, her favourites are the ones she sang with that old flame, the chap who was down the hall. Lucky escape they had there didn't they? Oh and Dr Hill has a set of golf clubs that are finally going to come out of his cupboard - there are golf courses everywhere in Florida. What Rayna has is fifty-two broken bones and a pain in her chest that she doesn't think has anything to do with the accident and that she knows has everything to do with it. He'd broken the furniture the night he found out she'd married Teddy. He was supposed to be in rehab three hundred miles away - who'd have thought you could persuade three guards and a doorman to let you out of a no-outside-contact residential facility? But then he always was persuasive when he was hell-bent on one of his benders. He didn't know she was pregnant. She wonders if he'd still have thrown that lamp so close to her head if he had known.

#

She only asks about Deacon twice. Once when she first wakes up, disorientated and confused and scared that she doesn't know where the hell she is and she can't feel her toes and her lungs are obviously on fucking fire because nothing else could possibly make them blaze so much. Maddie is there with Teddy, no Daphne, she's too young to see her mother screw her eyes closed and try not to scream with the pain. It probably shouldn't hurt so much, given that she's drugged up to her eyeballs and she doesn't really know what her own name is unless she really really thinks about it, but it does and when her nerves have become aware of their trauma, her mind joins the party and that's a hundred times worse. There aren't enough drugs in the whole damn hospital for that. When she asks about him that time it is through gritted teeth that try not to clamp shut so she can breathe and her grip on Maddie's hand probably hurts her. She needs to know, and she needs someone to tell her quickly, and Maddie does, she tells her he is alive and for that moment it is enough. The second time is more considered, Tandy is by her bedside and they are reading crossword puzzles while it rains outside. 'Two across, six letters, Johnny Cash record,' she says, and Rayna answers: 'Tell me how he is.' The puzzle books slips off the edge of the bedcovers as Tandy replies, keeping it brief. He's at home, Coleman's been forcing him to rest. Rayna doesn't know whether to be relieved or bereft that he is more than a few walls away from her.

#

Bertha brings her her first cup of coffee. It's the stuff from the vending machine, the stuff she used to hate but grew so used to when she'd spent half her life here with Deacon in a bed having his stomach pumped and broken glass picked out of his forehead. It was always too hot, but she had never been able to let it cool, needing the caffeine to hit her veins so she could stay awake and make sure he didn't rip the needles out of his hands and try to leave. Funny how it became a constant, something she knew would never change even if the doctors did and the lines on his face grew deeper and the chairs were replaced with plastic ones she could never sleep in. She wishes Bertha had been here then. The coffee leaves a bitter tang in her mouth that tastes better than anything has since the searing kiss Deacon gave her before it all went wrong.

#

Juliette is her most surprising visitor. When she takes her hand Rayna almost laughs from pure shock, but she doesn't, she holds right on back and listens as she talks about how sorry she is for what's happened. From anyone else Rayna would hear platitudes and sympathies that are real but make her feel no better, but from Juliette she feels the smallest bloom in her chest that maybe all is not lost and it surprises the hell out of her. She didn't know how bad it was, Juliette tells her, what Deacon was capable of, that he would be so terrifying, so dark. She didn't know when he fell off the wagon that he would fucking jump off it and drag Rayna underneath it with him. She feels warm tears roll down her cheeks for the first time since she's been in the soulless room and words tumble out of her mouth that tell stories of days she didn't think she would see again, days that have haunted her all these years. He would call her when he was wasted, plead with her to come to him, tell her he would put the bottle down only if he could swap it for her, if she would stay with him. She would leave his bed the next morning telling herself she had to before he woke, but she knew he would be passed out until noon anyway. They would pull him from the fights, Coleman and Bucky and friends he used to have that had stopped calling him over the years as he'd sunk into his isolation that blocked everyone out but her, he was never strong enough to isolate himself from her. Coleman would pin his arms by his sides while he struggled and even though he was almost twice Deacon's size he would be hard pressed to tamper down the rage and the fear and the grief coursing through him. She would yell at him until she was so hoarse Bucky would make her stop before she ruined her throat and left herself unable to sing the next night, and then she would cry. She would cry while she told him he had to stop, begged him not to do this to himself, not to do this to her, and he would cry, and he would stop struggling and sag to the floor and they would take him home. It didn't end though, it never ended; he would reach for her the instant they got through the door and she would come to him, every time she would come to him, and he would kiss her too deeply while Coleman and Bucky stood awkwardly by and he would tell her it would all be okay if she would just come to bed with him and then he would slide his hand under her shirt and she would stop him just long enough to tell Coleman and Bucky that she had this one, that they should go home. Juliette cries too as she listens. She should have known, but no one knew, no one who knows him now and didn't then. He is the perfect shoulder to cry on, the strong one, now. But Rayna knows. Rayna has always known. She asks about her mother, and Juliette cries some more.

#

She only smiles for her children. There is a small reserve of pretence she can draw from, all the years of practice she's had at pretending everything is just fine thank you just absolutely great when she's wanted to scream and tell them all to piss off her life is falling to pieces and she is falling to pieces and Deacon is falling to pieces. She saves it for them, for their innocent faces that look up at her and need their mother to move any part of her body at all to reassure them that she will bake cakes with them and pack their lunches one day again just like she used to. They have suffered, the weeks they spent not seeing her smile, not knowing if she ever would again, listening to the beats of her heart on a monitor like she was some kind of robot that may never twirl them around the living room to songs on the radio. She can't keep up the pretence with anyone else, but she smiles for her daughters. They need her to.

#

Bertha is the only one who talks about Deacon. He is not so much an elephant in the room as a wrecking ball, and whenever she wants to ask about him and the words are almost out of her mouth, she thinks of the placating pats on the arm and the tight smiles she will get instead of answers and so she asks nothing at all. But Bertha talks about him. She sits with her while she winces as her bones slowly knit themselves back together and tells her like a mother would tell a child stories to help them doze when they were sick with fever. How awkwardly he slept in the chair in the corner, how they tried to send him home four days before he would finally allow himself to be discharged, how one of the junior nurses had seen him right back there the very next day, sitting in the waiting area opposite her room, speaking to no one. How she'd found him out in the garden vomiting violently into the gardenia bushes the night she'd flatlined and been technically dead for two tense minutes before they'd brought her back by the skin of her teeth. Bertha rubs her shoulder as she tells her that one. And when she says 'He comes back you know, every day. He's here every day, for you,' Rayna thinks she might set the EKG off all over again.

#

She's been to the morgue in this hospital. Deacon had overdosed on pills and 7-Eleven brandy - it had been the only thing they'd sell him and it had smelt like white spirit when she'd cleaned the shattered glass up off the bathroom floor and wiped it across her face in place of the tears she didn't have left - and was lying in a room on the main ward that was much more clinical than the one she's in now. She has vague, disjointed memories of the other patients and their visitors staring at her as she'd left the room when she could no longer look at his face because she might just finish the job herself and save them both. She remembers how they hadn't bothered to cover their mouths when they'd whispered to each other about the singer whose boyfriend was a drunken mess and did they see he'd ended up in the slammer again for smashing a glass over that poor man's head and what on earth had happened to her shoes for her to be stumbling down the corridor with bare feet like that? She'd walked blindly, away from them, away from him, away from herself, until she'd reached a dead end. When she'd looked up the sign had been stark on the bright white wall, a declaration that the people beyond it had no hope to be salvaged. She'd found herself pushing the door open before she'd known what she was doing. It had been still, peaceful even, and she'd breathed in the smell of formaldehyde and drawn some calm from how it had stung her nostrils. Deacon had been a brandy bottle away from taking her back there, and she'd hated him for it. The porter that had found her hadn't yelled at her when he'd taken her by the arm and helped her trembling legs to move away from what she didn't want to see. She knows full well the reprieve she's been given that has allowed her to narrowly avoid ending up on one of those metal trays herself. She's always known that's the way it will end, that they will lay right there next to each other when the day comes. Whether one of them still has a beating heart is irrelevant.

#

She feels like a child when the physio helps her to hold onto the bars in the room that looks like a school gym. Taking her damn first steps again like she is a child. Deacon missed Maddie's first steps, when she'd been tiny and uncontrollable and smirked just like him when she found something funny. She walks, slowly and carefully, and curses under her breath when she can't do it at first, louder when she still can't. One shaky foot in front of the other. That night is the first she sleeps through until morning.

#

They tell her she can go home the day she feels him standing in her doorway. Her daughters and Teddy have left, saying they need to get the house ready for her to return to, but she knows they understand that she needs a little time, she knows the house has been ready for her to return since the day she left it. She needs some time to say goodbye to what was almost the last place she was more than a memory, to try and find some kind of truce with the thoughts that plague her before she steps out into the life she used to know and tries to fit back into it. She knows instantly it is him, and his face when she looks up is still, he is still. He says nothing. Useless arms hang by his side and he says nothing. She is scared about going home.


End file.
